Nick Gauthier is a web freelancer focusing on Ruby on Rails and JavaScript. His experience spans from SQL to Sass and he always tests, all the time. He wrote “Recipes with Backbone” with Chris Strom and recently released his most recent eBook “Mobile Web Patterns with Backbone.js”. Aside from freelancing Nick runs B’More Awesome, a Baltimore-based web training organization, and he also co-founded Exobrain, an online mind-mapping tool.
When we set out to build MeetSpace (a video conferencing app for distributed teams), we had a familiar decision to make: What’s our tech stack going to be? We gathered our requirements, reviewed our team’s skillset and ultimately decided to use vanilla JavaScript and to avoid a front-end framework.
Using this approach, we were able to create an incredibly fast and light web application that is also less work to maintain over time. The average page load on MeetSpace has just 1 uncached request and is 2 KB to download, and the page is ready within 200 milliseconds. Let’s take a look at what went into this decision and how we achieved these results.
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The best mobile web applications are the ones that excel at handling mobile processors, network connectivity, bandwidth, latency and touchscreen keyboards. In this article, Nick Gauthier will look at how to identify the tasks your users want to accomplish on a mobile device, memorize your users’ situation, presume that their actions will succeed, and also how to predict your users’ next actions, and prepare accordingly. The mobile web is a harsh environment, but by simply focusing on what matters, you will find a clear path to a superior experience.
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